Curator Christina Li delves into post-pandemic realities for her contribution to ‘OVR: Portals’

Art Basel’s 'OVR: Portals' is a response to our times. Gathering 94 galleries, the online presentation takes its cues from the transformations brought about by the pandemic – transformations resulting directly from virtual hyperconnectivity and physical isolation. As we collectively take stock of the cataclysmic events that continue to unravel, what new modes of living can be imagined? Some of the artists being shown in the online viewing rooms apprehend the present with new productions, others share existing works that, when seen in the current context, help us envision possible futures. Negotiating different geographies, temporalities, and technological processes, their works interrogate and reinvent established typologies and hegemonies. They invite us to reassess the disjointed realities that have come to characterize our contemporary experience.

A number of works presented here draw attention to the porous demarcation between physical, symbolic, and virtual territories. At STPI, Heman Chong’s Foreign Affairs (2018) gathers photographs of the backdoors of embassies. Serially printed on curtains, these nondescript entrances function as access points into the geopolitical. Chong’s work highlights the elements that signify the exceptional qualities of each embassy; these infrastructures not only handle control and conflicts in foreign diplomacy, they also regulate our movements and daily life.

Meanwhile, Nawin Nuthong’s new body of work, presented by Bangkok CityCity Gallery, fuses characters mined from popular culture to explore classification systems in the digital realm. A room, where they are COEVALs [Precise at a dig site door] (2021) stages an imagined conversation between the archaeologist character in the Japanese manga One Piece and a pair of guardian lions from the video game Street Fighter. Challenging the notion of access and history-writing, Nuthong’s speculative sculptures and films reimagine the history of Thailand’s Rattanakosin Kingdom, which was most notable for being the only Southeast Asian state to retain its independence in the early 2oth century, despite attempts from Western colonial powers to subjugate it.

With the global circulation of people having ground to a halt, how can we reconsider the concept of locality and the many possible relationships that exist within a place? Cree First Nation artist Duane Linklater’s expansive practice maps the frictions between Indigenous life and the legacies of settlers' colonial ideologies. His new series of dyed, painted, and digital prints on linen, exhibited by Catriona Jeffries, features Western-inspired abstraction, rendered using organic materials such as honey, yellow ochre, and charcoal. Fragments of Cree writing are also superimposed on the abstract forms. By using rough English translations as titles, Linklater points to the erasure, and dispossession, that take place in the translation processes. His work reasserts the marginalization of Indigenous knowledge and identity.

Art’s potential as a space of self-determination and agency is further explored through the lens of community and craft in Yee I-Lann and her collaborators’ presentation at Silverlens. Yee was born in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo; she moved back there from Kuala Lumpur in 2016/17, and has since been working with local weavers on tikars, the multifunctional bamboo or pandanus fiber mats that are used across Southeast Asia. The humble tikar embodies a tradition shared by sea-based communities in Borneo, undocumented migrants, and stateless Indigenous people who traditionally work the land. TANAHAIRKU #003 (with weaving by S. Narty Raitom, Julia Ginasius, and Julitah Kulinting) (2021) is woven with the Malay/Indonesian words tanah (land) and air (water/sea) to make up tanahair (homeland). These words thus bridge a historical boundary between two communities. Yee and her collaborators extend the democratic and communal spirit of the tikar beyond the confines of the mat, prompting us to reconsider the notions of home, distance, and mutual exchange in a collective gesture of place-making.

A handful of artists in OVR: Portals probe into our interior worlds, and their acute observations might help us get our bearings during these moments of disorientation. On view at SCAI The Bathhouse is a constellation of artistic positions that delve into enigmatic and foreign realms. MOON & JEON’svideoA Molded Moon, Life within a Vase (2016) is a mythological tale of two incompatible worlds, separated by the walls of a Korean moon vase. One protagonist is caught within the jar and grapples with the limitations of human life and consciousness, while the other eternally searches for perfection and knowledge. This contemporary Faustian tale is a philosophical introspection that embraces questions of time and mortality.

Job Koelewijn’sworks at Galerie Fons Welters are part of an ongoing project that began in 2006. Every day, the artist reads aloud for 45 minutes from books whose subjects range from philosophy and art history to literature and science. The books and resulting recordings are displayed in specially made panels hosting stacks of cassette tapes, as in Relief 20 Nov 2015 - 20 Jul 2017 (2015–20). As technology moved on, so did the works, and Relief 4, 28 Nov 2014 - 26 Jul 2017 (2014–20) features a carrying case of USB sticks. True time capsules, Koelewijn’s Relief works are the outcome of a part-ritual, part-mental exercise. He utilizes time, language, and knowledge as material in his lifelong endeavor of self-exploration.

Edith Dekyndt’s presentation at Konrad Fischer Galerie is part of a three-artist showcase looking at the concepts of time and place. Her contribution features discarded goods destined for the global south salvaged from Hamburg’s port. The Nature of the North in All the Beauty of Her Horrors, Saison 1 (2019) is an open chest freezer filled with murky ice. The piece’s title is taken from the instruction the 19th-century collector Johann Gottlob von Quandt gave the landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich in correspondence with him, which resulted in the commissioned painting Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice) (1823-24). Dekyndt’s transient sculpture is a poignant reflection on the ecological chasms between nature and artifice and brings together two eras almost two centuries apart. A specimen of the global trade in consumer detritus, it also reveals the power asymmetries and historical legacies that are still very much in place today.

From refuse to toxicity: Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz’sToxic (2012) at Ellen de Bruijne Projects considers the historical accounts of discrimination and violence enacted toward the queer community or minorities. Performed by Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch, the film restages two scenes: the Paris police force’s infamous collection of anthropological mug shots of homosexuals and transvestites taken in the 1870s, and a BBC interview with the celebrated queer French playwright Jean Genet, during which he discussed being treated like a criminal by the police. By questioning the established power relations between photographer and the photographed subject, the film challenges toxic norms imposed on marginalized individuals under the cover of scientific research or preservation of social order.

Can a wound be understood as a portal, as an opening toward a new form of understanding? Dinh Q. Lê’s solo presentation at P.P.O.W. challenges, with subjective accounts of trauma, the dominant Vietnam War narrative commodified by American movies. His series Vietnam to Hollywood (2000-2003) combines war-film stills with found photographs of unidentified Vietnamese people during the same period. The images are set alongside the two-channel film From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage (2007). The video installation combines footage from Platoon and Apocalypse Now ina never-ending cycle of military violence and PTSD. Lê’s work is an attempt to disrupt and reappropriate an identity that has been defined by mediated images. He and other artists in the online viewing rooms demonstrate the possibility of using one’s own agency to recover one’s own subjectivities – and bridge divides in these disruptive times.

Christina Li is an independent curator based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong. Together with Magalí Arriola and Larry Ossei-Mensah, she is co-curating 'OVR: Portals', which will run from June 16 to 19, 2021. Find out more on www.artbasel.com/ovr.

Top image: Dinh Q. Lê, Untitled from Vietnam to Hollywood (detail), 2005. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W., New York City.